Sightseeing and Others

This was a longer-than-usual trip.  Experience tells us that a four-day trip such as our previous Shanghai trip or Taipei trip was too much of a rush.  As we would like to give our members enough time to relax and recharge their energy, we extended it to 5 days.

We visited seven libraries in 2 days, which is a record among our three overseas trips.  After this tight and information-overloaded schedule, we felt like we had taken a crash course on numerous new library technologies, especially the radio frequency applications.  Believers of "work hard, play hardé as we are, we made full use of the available time to forget the stress from work and chores at home.

As usual, we had solicited the help of a travel agent to organize the sight-seeing part of our trip, so that we could gracefully change our hat from a librarian to a tourist.  Since we had more leisure time, we visited most of the tourist sites, such as the Singapore River, Clarke Quay, Mandai Orchid Gardens, Singapore Zoological Gardens and Sentosa Island.   In Sentosa, of course we took pictures of the 37 metre high Merlion, rode the mono-rail train and visited the Images of Singapore and the Underwater World.

How can a trip be complete without shopping?  Our very humorous tourist guide took us to Chinatown to purchase the must-buys: ointments and sliced meat.  I was amazed by the sheer variety of ointments and their seemingly unlimited kinds of curing effects.  The sliced meat shop is also an eye-opener.  Inside the little shop, you could find different types of sliced meat (e.g. pork, beef, chicken, lobsters, shrimps) and an array of snacks, sauces and pastes.  These made excellent souvenirs.  Jewelry shops and gift shops were also places where some of our trip members loosened their purse strings without the slightest hesitation.

Quite a number of our trip members have visited Singapore before.  So some of us made a detour to visit their friends, relatives or former colleagues or simply to revisit their favourite places or to go shopping.  Two members even attended a live evening concert at the Victoria Concert Hall.

Activities after dinner were even more varied.  It seems that librarians love to visit bookstores wherever they go.  We did that in Shanghai and Taipei and we happily kept the tradition this time.  On the very first night, some of our trip members made their way to Borders and Kinokuniya, which were just around the corner of our hotel.  A visit to the famous Night Safari made us feel like kids again.  The weather was very hot and humid, even at night.  So sipping a drink in an alfresco café or in a luxurious hotel like The Raffles Hotel or Westin Stamford certainly cooled us down.

Thanks to Singapore's multicultural society, we could see the architecture, customs and colourful festivals that manifest the proud heritage of the Chinese, Malays and Indians.  And we were equally interested in trying out the different cuisines available.  This time, we had more varieties than the previous two trips.  The buffet dinner at our hotel basically gave us an overview of the tastes of different ethnic cuisine.  Though it is not native to Singapore, we found the lunch of Hainanese Chicken rice hosted by the National University of Singapore Libraries better than the ones we had in Hong Kong.  The lavish Chinese dinner at the Carlton hosted by VTech Systems and ST LogicTrack and the seafood dinner hosted by 3M were superb and gave us an opportunity to chat among ourselves and to discuss the technical details that were missed out during the library visits. We thank them for their enthusiastic reception and hospitality.  After careful research and evaluation, we organized a Vietnamese lunch for a change after visiting the Library@Orchard.  It turned out to be very good.  We all felt the change of style when we came to the more humble meals provided by the travel agent.  Perhaps we can call it a balanced diet.

On the last day of our visit, everybody got some refund, in time for some last minute shopping at the Duty Free Shop.  As usual, more bags were checked in on the return journey and they certainly were fat and bulgy!

Though most of us have visited Singapore before, it seemed that everyone enjoyed this business-cum-leisure trip a lot.  I heard people discussing that the first thing they would do when they got back home was to lose a few pounds.  I hope people find this trip fulfil their purpose and hope they will join us again in future outings.  For those who missed this trip, please watch out for our up-coming library visits in July 2002.

Suggestions as to what libraries you would like to visit or the place of our next out-of-town trip can be emailed to: hkla@hkla.org

Reported by Brenda Yi

 

Singapore river

Far East Plaza

Sentosa Island

Chinatown